year end letter to friends, 2007 - robert's writing

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Koran) that Christians missed the message, because they were tied (I think is the word) to the bringer of the message. Forget the message for the messenger. I think the word is something like the channel, the path, through which the message come from God to Man. The man is not the message we would say. Muslims do not talk much about Muhammad; he is certainly not deified. I remember the boy who first told me what Islam was all about. I was twelve perhaps, he not quite a year younger. We were "best friends." He said, "Islam is not difficult to understand. It is simple. God is all, and all is God. That is what we believe." My parents had not given me any information about the religions their parents and foreparents had practiced. The year before, they had sent me to a Protestant and also to a Catholic Sunday school, making sure that I could go from one to the other on the same Sunday. All I remember is that the Catholics went on and on about how awful Protestants are, and the Protestants were indignant about how wrong the Catholics were. I think my education lasted no more than two Sundays. God is all and all is God, was an idea that I could grasp. My friend and I talked the whole afternoon, I remember. I would point to a scruffy dog. "Yes, that is God, too." A plant, a house, a person, the air, sunshine; yes, all of that was God. So, then God is everything. "Of course," he said. "Isn't that what I said" Maybe, probably, it was on another occasion that I asked whether he believed we had descended from apes. "Did we" he asked. Yes, that's what I learned in school: scientists look at fossils--those rocks with the imprint of dead animals in it--and they can tell that one turned into the other. "I like apes," he said with a great smile. Yes, I did too. At the time we housed a gibbon at our houses, a creature I much admired. Gibbons are trapeze artists, elegant. To me they looked refined, aristocratic. Our gibbon was affectionate, wrapping his arms around my neck, lags around my hips. But he was definitely not a pet. He knew who he was. If you try to force him to do something he didn't want to do, he let you know. My friend told me he learned a lot about animals from an uncle who olived in the jungle, he said. How animals take care of themselves, and of each other. I told him I liked tigers, and that we had gone to a little zoo -- actually just the house and land of someone who loved animals. People from the villages would bring him orphaned animals. One time they had brought a young tiger; the mother killed by hunters. The owner of the place had told us that when the tiger had first come, they had a sort of wild goat who roamed around. The goat (larger than a western goat) had come right up to the little tiger, who was very unhappy. The goat lay down and took care of the tiger. (Tigers love to eat goats, but this little tiger perhaps did not know that yet). Later--the goat was gone--, when the tiger was grown to maybe the size of a very large dog, or a small pony, our family stopped there on our way back from the harbor one time. I sought out the tiger. I looked at the tiger, his face now on the same level with mine. We looked at each other. I remember talking to him, not voice, but inside. I told him I admired his looks, and his calm, but powerful self-assurance, a kind of pride that shone in his eyes. I felt sure he understood me, and I understood him. Suddenly I felt a hand hard on my shoulder, "That's close enough, young man. That is a tiger, well on the way to being full grown, and he is not tame." I turned around indignantly, to see who was pinching my shoulder, wanting to protest. The hand dug more painfully in my shoulder, "The first rule is never to look away from a tiger." I immediately turned back and apologized to the
tiger, thinking to him that I certainly did not want to offend his dignitiy, but that the man… But the man pulled me back. The tiger looked as confused as I felt. Oh yes, religion. I have read the Bible, all through. A strange hodgepodge of stories that did not add up for me, The Ten Commandments, which is perhaps one of the center pieces of the Jewish-Christian branch of faiths, seems lucid and clear by comparison. Thou Shall not Kill: what could be simpler. Too simple for Man, evidently: we ignore that Commandment. I have read two different English translations of the Koran -- all serious Muslims feel that "the Koran" is so holy that the Arabic cannot be translated. A good translation should be called something other than "the" Koran. That too is a book of stories, and I found it often difficult to find the true messages in them. The stories of the Koran were compiled within years of Muhammad's death; The Bible was compiled three hundred years after the Crucifixion, when Christianity had already split into two or three different versions, with different emphases. I feel I have always learned more from the behavior and the talk of people, ordinary people, in their daily lives. My mother came from a Mennonite background. She never told me much about the life of Mennonites in the Netherlands, but I learned when I lived there. The utter bare-boned simplicity of their worship and their lives appeals immensely to me. And, as I saw it, their emphasis is on living life as Christ suggested we live with each other, rather than on the horrors of his death, or on "sin," a comcept I find difficult to understand. The idea that we are all born in sin seems bizarre. The life of Muslims I have known centers around their passion for Allah, the All that is God. I too feel that, it appeals to my mind and it resonates in my heart, my soul (whatever that is). But then, I have never known "martyrs," who we call suicide bombers, and condemn as terrorists. I have always wanted to feel, to join in, that passion of Muslim prayer. Praise God, praise Life, praise the All. I wanted to feel such self-erasing passion, but my western self, with such an emphasis on control, intellect, reason, prevented me. Several times in my life I have made efforts to understand Christians, and Jews, from being with people who lived their faith. Christians think of their faith as monotheism, One God, but there are so many: Jesus, Mary, the Holy Ghost (or Spirit), saints. And I cannot feel a passion for the torture and killing of a man, or for sin. There are a thousand other religions, a few I have studied, lived, experienced. Now, at the end of my life, I have simplified everything, including my beliefs. The bottom line, for me, is that I am part of this earth, the Mystery as some Native Americans call it. I deeply feel the fantastic inter-relatedness of all Life forms and the rocks and air, wind and rain, fire and storms, of this planet. I see, what others call God perhaps, all around and in me. I experience the Oneness. I love plants, trees, animals. And I cannot imagine that "I" is important in this wonder of Oneness. I cannot accept that we, humans, are more important than a frog or a tree. It disturbs me profoundly that we, homo sapiens, Man, seem to have lost any understanding of that Oneness that is the planetary ecology, the biosphere of which we are born. I see that forgetting as the origin of the wrongness I see all around me today. Friends remind me, and of course I know, that there are wonderful people everywhere, and that they do wonderful things. But I cannot see them without also seeing the immense effect our stupidity and greed are having on the Oneness that is the Planet and
Page 1: Day before Christmas 2007. This aft
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year end letter to friends, 2007 - robert's writing

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